Conservatives are Dominating the Media Landscape by most metrics. Cable TV ratings shows that Fox news has THREE times thew viewership of MSNBC and CNN combined in primetime ratings. Across Digital, Daily Wire has more engagements on social media than ALL Top left wing publishers COMBINED. How this translates into liberal and democrat voting habits is to be seen but it seems conservatives are substantially more active in news and politics than liberals by and by a wide margin. This could forecast the outcome of the mid terms if the right wing is more active.
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There are many metrics by which it seems that the right is actually winning the media war.
Television ratings, newsprint circulation, and digital media engagements.
The other day on my second channel, I was reading an article about American polarization, and in it they linked to a study from Newswhip.
The study shows that on social media, the most actively engaged with page for the left is Occupy Democrats, a propaganda conspiracy website, whereas the right typically engages with Fox News, which, while it is partisan, is considered to be a credible source of information.
I started to dig into more data, and it does seem that across the board, whatever is happening right now, it looks like conservatives are consuming and engaging with media way more than the left is.
I don't know how that will translate to the midterms, but I think it's going to have a significant impact.
So first, let's take a look at television ratings to see just who is winning.
Spoiler alert, it's Fox News.
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Adweek has the scoreboard for Saturday, October 6th, the latest ratings from major cable news programs.
This was published just yesterday.
Now we need only look at a few data points.
First, in the key demo of 25 to 54, Fox News primetime was 583,000, CNN was 136, MSNBC was 82, and HLN was 92.
883,000, CNN was 136, MSNBC was 82, and HLN was 92.
If you combine CNN and MSNBC, Fox News has more than double their viewership.
You could even combine all three, and Fox News is still dominating.
And it gets really interesting when you look at total viewership.
Fox News primetime was 3 million, 3.3 million.
If you were to combine CNN, MSNBC, and HLN, Fox News is still around three times higher in total viewership.
In past videos I've made, we saw how Fox News was about 100,000 viewers more than CNN and MSNBC combined.
In total viewership, Fox News would have like 2.5 million.
CNN plus MSNBC would equal about 2.3 to 2.4 million.
Now, from this past weekend, in total viewership primetime, Fox News has more than three times their viewership.
That was actually shocking to me.
A lot of people like to make the claim that Fox News's viewers are old and they're all dying.
But when we look at the key demographic, 25 to 54, we can see that's not true.
CNN does like to brag that their viewership is on average younger by about four or five years than Fox News.
But does that really matter when Fox News has more than four times the viewership in the key demo?
They can sit there and brag all they want that their viewership is younger, but Fox News has four times the younger viewers, so does it really matter?
But where things start to get pretty scary, in my opinion, is when we look at this report from Newswhip.
Partisan publishers and political content.
Everything you need to know about the state of political news across social media.
The top Facebook pages for political content.
Fox News with 99 million engagements, and Occupy Democrats with 95 million engagements.
The important thing to realize is that Fox News, for conservatives, it's actually a news website.
FoxNews.com is considered to be widely credible by many sources.
Though there are people on the left who will accuse them of being partisan and biased, they are partisan and biased, but they are not fake news.
Occupy Democrats, however, is considered to be absurdly fake news.
And don't take my word for it.
We can go to PolitiFact, where they say, Occupy Democrats file.
And the PolitiFact scoreboard shows that Occupy Democrats has no definitively true articles.
One that they've reviewed is mostly true, but they're mostly half-true, false, or even pants on fire.
And if you don't trust PolitiFact, we can look at NewsGuard.
NewsGuard gives ratings to various news organizations.
They say, for OccupyDemocrats.com, proceed with caution.
This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.
They repeatedly publish fake content.
They do not gather information responsibly.
They do not clarify errors.
They do not handle the difference between news and opinion reasonably.
They have deceptive headlines.
They do disclose ownership.
They do label advertising.
But they don't reveal who's in charge, including possible conflicts of interest.
They do provide information about content creators.
If we look at the same thing for Fox News, we can see that they do get some criticism, but overwhelmingly, NewsGuard says, this website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.
This information was rather alarming to me.
If you watch my second channel, you'd have seen me talk a little bit about this.
For those that are watching now, I think it's kind of shocking that the most engaged with page by the left is a conspiracy propaganda site that is rated to be not credible.
And as much as Fox News is a partisan right-wing site, people who engage with it are actually getting credible information, even if it is partisan.
But let's talk about why the left may be losing the media war.
According to Newswhip, the first thing to note when we are looking at left versus right in terms of content production is that there are significantly more producers of right-wing content than there are of left-wing content.
Only 88 publishers are identified in our left-wing category compared to 357 publishers for the right.
I want to point out, here, it's possible Newswhip just did a bad job.
However, Newswhip is trying to sell a technology that tracks trends across social media.
They use machine learning and algorithms to track down partisan content, so this is likely not the result of an individual editor, but software that tracks posts and determine who was left and who was right.
We can see that the right has substantially more digital outlets than the left.
They say, this categorization is based on third-party definitions of political affiliation, with the sites then tagged as such in our database.
And we can see here, top right-wing publishers.
The number one right-wing publisher is Daily Wire, with 132 million engagements.
The top left-wing publisher is The Root, with only 25 million engagements.
In fact, we have to go down to the Daily Caller.
The fifth place to figure out where the left would even stack up.
The top five positions of right-wing publications have more individually than the top publication on the left.
In fact, the Daily Wire has more engagements than all left-wing publishers combined.
So what does this mean for the midterms?
I have no idea, but the ratings for Fox News are way up relative to the past few months I've been tracking them, and the ratings for CNN and MSNBC combined can't really keep up.
But it's not just about mainstream publications.
It's not just about digital publications.
There's also alternative sources like YouTube.
And Vice ran this article.
From last year.
Why the right is dominating YouTube and why the left needs to own the future of online video.
Twitter is a tiny echo chamber.
I'm not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whooping being dished out to them on YouTube.
Thus reads a tweet posted by InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson.
Who you may remember best as the right-wing vlogger who inadvertently promised every journalist in the world a free holiday to Sweden.
As with most things PJW does nowadays, the tweet was immediately and widely mocked.
But however fun mocking Watson might be, there was a curious hollowness to the whole affair because on this issue, breaking the habit of a lifetime, Paul Joseph Watson is right.
Now this is just an article from Vice and is presumably someone's opinion.
I don't know who does dominate YouTube in terms of left and right, but it really does seem to be the right.
And I think this is exemplified when you look at the like-to-dislike ratio and comment section of basically every video.
When I go to YouTube channels for people like David Pakman, they do have a lot of left-wing and progressive viewers.
The Young Turks do as well.
But you'll see that a lot of conservative people will give them thumbs down, will come into the comments and start posting conservative ideas, or even sometimes very far-right ideas.
When you look at the ratio on far left content, it's typically thumbs down across the board, and when you look at conservative content, it's typically thumbs up.
I started to wonder if this was true, because in my experience, my observation shows that YouTube does tend to be conservative.
I asked someone who works for Google, and they told me that yes.
In their experience working with news on YouTube, independent creators tend to be either politically independent or conservative.
There are very few prominent progressive channels.
They exist, don't get me wrong.
But for the most part, the audiences and the creators tend to be conservative.
Maybe the reason we see so many conservatives being censored or banned is because there's substantially more of them who engage significantly more.
The people who are espousing left-wing values aren't as prevalent as right-wing personalities.
Thus, we will end up seeing more right-wing personalities get banned or suspended.
Now, it is true.
We've heard statements from employees talking about how they do target conservatives.
And it's funny to me that among the mainstream personalities on the left, they say it's a conspiracy theory, when we literally had Facebook admit they were censoring conservative news stories.
But the fact remains that looking at all of this data, it seems like conservatives are winning.
Now, there's probably a lot more data I missed.
These are only a few points that I've looked at.
Some people probably want to contest the things that I've brought up, and that's fair.
This is not an exhaustive research study.
I just pulled up ratings.
I pulled up ratings for news websites, and I looked at an article about YouTube.
It doesn't mean any of this is definitively true, but we can say Fox News has more than triple the primetime viewership as of this weekend than CNN and MSNBC combined.
This might mean something really profound for the midterms.
It may explain why the right has dominated all three branches of government, and it may explain why Trump is winning.
Because whatever the left is doing, it isn't working.
I tweeted something out earlier about how I feel about all of this.
And I found that, in my experience, the left has no problem excising you.
I consider myself to hold left-wing values.
That doesn't mean I'm part of any tribal group.
A lot of people say, don't support them.
I don't.
I support my personal values.
But what I've found is, when you talk to people on the left, no one cares.
You are still not left-wing.
If you talk to people on the right, people will accuse you of being right-wing.
That means politics can only flow in one direction.
And as people on the left yell at me for calling out things like this, for saying, hey listen, conservatives consume more news than you do, Conservatives are watching more news than you are.
They get mad at me because the left has no problem removing me from the group.
Meanwhile, conservatives are actively trying to recruit.
So to me, it feels like politics is flowing straight into the conservatives.
I don't know what that's going to mean for the elections.
A lot of people are still saying that the Democrats are going to take the house, and that may be true, but maybe this means something.
When it comes to out-fundraising a political opponent, those funds are used to hire people and to do press, to buy commercials.
But if conservatives watch significantly more news, that means those ideas are more likely to be shared.
And when it comes to engagements on social media, The Daily Wire has more engagements than every top left-wing source combined.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about all this?
Do you think it's true?
I mean, I have a lot of data here to back it up, but look.
This report from Newswhip, they have numbers, it doesn't mean anything they're saying is true.
They're trying to market a product, I don't think they're going to lie to newsrooms.
This report I'm reading is intended to show how valuable their analytics service is.
So, I lean towards trusting it, but always take these things with a grain of salt.
As for the TV ratings from Adweek, those tend to be credible.
So it really does seem like conservatives are dominating.
But again, comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m., and more videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, coming up at 6 p.m.
